Snowed In With Death

by Ruby Loren

  “No need to keep her alive, she’s nothing to me,’” Rob said, perhaps mishearing Tom, or perhaps choosing completely the wrong moment to display his usual dark sense of humour. Holly only just resisted kicking him in the ribs.

  It would have been a very fatal kick.

  “Nice to meet you, Tom. Killing the other detectives so you could be the brightest and best, huh? That’s pretty clever!” she said, trying to play for time.

  Fortunately, Tom was more than happy to gloat. “I hated these stupid meetings. Every time, it was always: ‘Boast about your greatest case, while the others pick holes and point out how they would have done it all a hundred times better’. Who needs that?” He shook his head.

  Behind her, Holly heard Rob sigh. “I know you had a bit of a dry year, Tom, but that’s no reason to take it out on us. I thought we were buddies?” Rob said, still hanging precariously over the death pit.

  “I hate you. I’ve told you that several times,” Tom said.

  “Yeah, sure you have! Like… in the friendly way,” Rob replied.

  Tom ignored him. “Anyway, this was all a great idea. It’s Christmas come early for me! Now, if you’ll just be helpful and die, that would be lovely. It was all planned so that you would die last, Rob. I always hated you the most with your easy money cases. I bet you creamed cash from every single one, too! Who’s going to miss a few million when hundreds of millions of pounds worth of gold is recovered and returned?”

  Rob laughed as delicately as possible. “Have you seen the clothes I wear? And if you saw my house, you wouldn’t… Hey! You can see my house! Let’s go there now and have a cup of tea. I guarantee you’ll feel far less homicidal after a good brew.”

  Tom shook his head. “You are a terrible smooth talker. How have you lived this long?” He snorted. “Oh yes, I forgot. You’re more of an amateur metal-detector enthusiast than a true detective.”

  Rob grumbled something about being better at his job than Tom was, but he didn’t get to finish. Tom had balled up a snowball and managed to aim it past Holly. It smacked Rob’s thigh and caused him to jerk dangerously over the deadly pit.

  “What am I saying? You’re amazing! You were always the best of us. You can be the leader of every detective meeting we have from now on. How about you let me up?” Rob wheedled.

  “Smooth,” Holly muttered under her breath, unable to see any way out of this. She had one final trick up her sleeve, but she was willing to bet that Tom was a quicker draw than she was, and she would only have one chance…

  “Where do we go from here?” Holly asked, hoping that the more Tom talked, the more he’d lose his focus.

  To her dismay, he raised his gun. “I think I’ll shoot you backwards into the pit. You’ll make Rob fall to his death and you’ll both be impaled. It seems the most efficient way to end this. It’s nothing personal. You were never my competition, Holly, but you know who I am, etcetera, etcetera. It would be inconvenient if you lived to tell anyone that I was the one who engineered this series of untimely endings. It would certainly ruin things when I drive up here tomorrow only to discover that - oh no! All of my old friends are dead, leaving me the country’s best private detective. I’ll clean up,” he added with a grin. “I’ll clean up business-wise, I mean. Not the corpses.” His nose wrinkled.

  Holly realised that there was a reason he’d killed everyone remotely. Perhaps, deep down, he lacked the brutal resolve needed to murder with his own hands, or maybe he really despised seeing dead people. Either way, it gave her a chance…

  Her hand twitched towards her pocket, but Tom was quicker. The gun came up and the sound of a final, fatal shot, echoed across the snowy landscape.

  Holly opened one eye and cautiously looked down at her coat.

  It was bright red.

  But that was the colour it had been when she’d put it on to leave the house. There were no additional stains seeping through.

  “Rob?” she called, her voice thin.

  “Also not dead yet,” came the reply, which left only one option. Holly looked in front of her at where Tom March lay face down. A pool of crimson was already spreading out through the snow.

  “Did the idiot point it the wrong way or something?” Rob asked, sounding as baffled as Holly felt. She knelt and hauled upwards on his coat, giving him enough support to push himself up and away from the pit and its deadly spikes.

  “No idea what happened, but how about we don’t wait to find out?” Holly suggested and Rob nodded.

  “Too bad he didn’t happen to divulge any information about where the landmines are hidden during that annoying, evil monologue. Just our luck,” Rob commented, brushing the snow off his knees.

  Holly blinked as something silver reflected sunlight directly into her eyes.

  “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot!” a familiar voice called across the snow.

  Miranda emerged from the French doors and started walking towards them. The assault rifle she carried looked remarkably at home in her hands.

  “Hey… wasn’t she dead a minute ago?” Rob asked in a stage whisper.

  Holly shrugged. She’d been pretty sure, but looking back, none of them had actually checked the woman’s pulse. She’d just looked so… dead. The whole ‘not moving’ act had been very convincing. When you added one more death to the other murders, they’d all just made the assumption.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve just rescued us?” Rob asked hopefully.

  Miranda laughed and shook her head. Something about the way her eyes glinted let Holly know she was no longer playing the part of sweet, fluffy Miranda - the super-fan who would do anything at all for her heroes. The woman in front of them was undoubtedly the real Miranda - the person she’d hidden from them all.

  “No, this is actually the first wobble in the whole shebang. I thought Tom had already pulled the trigger when I shot him in the back. He probably hesitated, so he could talk some more. Blah blah blah, always going on.” She looked down at the dead traitor detective with distaste. “He was a pretty poor villain. We don’t really harp on about how life is unfair and how it’s all everyone else’s fault but our own that we’re not achieving anything. Real criminals just get on with the job.” She raised the gun to prove her point.

  “Wait! Just one thing! You’ve got to tell us why you did it. Please? Last request?” Holly asked, hoping she didn’t sound too pitiful.

  Miranda rolled her eyes and glanced down at the highly expensive watch she was wearing. Looking back, I suppose that watch was a bit out of place, Holly thought, remembering Miranda’s otherwise highly-planned eccentric and fluffy style of dress.

  “All right. The condensed version only. I contacted all of the detectives and pretended to be Little Miss Super-Fan, who just wanted to help them solve a case. I did it so that I could keep tabs find out if any of them were close to uncovering my operations. I knew about the murder case I helped them to solve because of my underworld connections, and it was a pleasure to tip the detectives off about the killer. He was an operative of mine who’d become quite a thorn in my side. Obviously, I’ve had to accept a few losses, but knowing about the detectives’ individual methods and the jobs they were on helped me to stay ahead - so they never caught the big game. Everything was great… until this year. Rob busted my biggest funding operation. He dug his way into one of my group’s tunnels and ruined the whole heist. It was a job that had taken years of planning, and in a single afternoon, this idiot stumbled upon it. You weren’t even looking for thieves, were you, Rob?” Miranda said, her voice cold.

  Rob blushed a little. “Ah, well… not so much at the start, but after I found them, I was definitely looking for thieves.”

  Holly raised her eyebrows at him.

  “I was hunting for something else, okay?” he told her.

  She decided to leave it at that. If they lived through the next five minutes, they could chit-chat later.

  “As I was saying… that was not in the plan. I realised that I had unknowingly
been engineering the perfect scenario to end the era of private detectives. Now all I needed was a fall guy…” They all looked at Tom. Rob gave a little groan, probably regretting how easily Tom - and all of them - had been manipulated. Or, knowing Rob, perhaps he was just thinking about how that chocolate cake hadn’t been poisoned after all.

  “Oh no, this makes so much sense now,” he said. Both women stared at him. “I should have figured it out sooner. You knew that Lawrence was going to be killed during the main course. That’s why you hadn’t bothered to bake the warm chocolate fudge cake. You already knew there wasn’t going to be a dessert! I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.”

  Holly stuck her tongue into her cheek realising that (weirdly) Rob was right. Miranda shrugged as if it changed nothing… which it didn’t.

  “So, Tom turns out to be the murderer while you, Miranda the organiser, manage to escape the bloodbath and shoot Tom with a weapon you just happened to find lying around the house,” Holly said, eyeing the assault rifle with skepticism. There was no way anyone was going to believe that one of those things had been easy to come by.

  Next to her, Rob cleared his throat. “My rifle was in my bag,” he muttered.

  Holly felt her heart drop. She opened her mouth to ask why he’d brought it, but then didn’t bother. For all she knew, the detectives brought their weapons with them, to show off how big and shiny they were. It wouldn’t have surprised her. Why had she ever wanted to join their ranks?

  “Rob, you are an idiot,” Holly said, turning to stare at him - hopefully distracting Miranda from what her right hand was up to.

  “Great last words,” Miranda commented dryly, and hefted the gun.

  Holly assumed she’d make it look like Tom had shot Rob and her, and then… Holly glanced at the gun in Tom’s hand. She’d need to reach for that, if she really wanted this murder to look the part, otherwise it would be all wrong.

  The gun she was holding in her hand wasn’t the one she’d use for them.

  She’d already shot Tom with it ‘saving the day’.

  She needed to pick the other gun up to kill them.

  “Don’t move,” Miranda growled, probably reading her facial expressions. “I can see you’re being Little Miss Smarty Pants, the amateur detective, but if this crime doesn’t end up being perfect, so what? All I lose is my role of the tragic heroine. I’ll just disappear and leave it as an unsolved massacre instead. I think we’ve chatted enough. Time to die,” she said, levelling the gun.

  Agatha Raisin

  For a brief moment, Miranda had to look down to check the location of Tom’s gun.

  Holly knew it was her only chance.

  She pulled the book free from her pocket and opened it up, keeping the spine towards her and the open pages pointed at Miranda. There was a twang when the spring loaded mechanism spat its deadly dart out. Aiming a book is a hard thing to do with any great degree of accuracy, but Holly had beginner’s luck on her side.

  The dart speared Miranda’s temple and embedded itself deep in her brain. The mass murderer’s hand squeezed the trigger of her assault rifle in a death spasm, but Holly had already moved out of harm’s way.

  “Agatha Raisin, you beauty,” Holly said, looking down at the amateur sleuth novel in her hand.

  A sound like ‘nnnngghhh’ came from behind her. She turned around and discovered they hadn’t escaped unscathed after all.

  “I think I’m dying. Not going to make it. You just… go on without me…” Rob said, his voice strained. Holly looked down at his hand, which was the only part of him that showed any sign of damage.

  “Bad luck. You’ve lost a finger. It’s hardly fatal though.” She pulled him to his feet using the other hand.

  “You don’t know that! It could go septic. Or perhaps the smell of blood will attract a pack of wolves. They have wolves in Scotland, right?” he said, his eyes fixed on the stump where his middle finger once was.

  Holly almost felt sorry for him. That was probably half of all the sign language he knew gone forever.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, not wanting to look down at the bodies in the snow, or even think about the events of the weekend. How could anyone take such pleasure from the demise of people who - despite knowing for a deceptive reason - they’d associated with for years? If you were going to do away with a whole group, something like a bomb disguised as a gas leak would have been a far more efficient way to go.

  Holly shook her head, wondering if she was starting to go loopy thinking about the best way to kill people. It was just that she couldn’t comprehend the amount of hate you needed to have in order to plan each individual death in such a way that mocked their greatest cases.

  “Crazy, so crazy,” Rob said, trailing along next to her, but sticking to the footprints Tom had made (just in case).

  “How could one person be so cruel?” Holly agreed, assuming he was following her thoughts.

  “Yeah, that chocolate cake has gone to waste. All because she pretended it was poisoned! That’s one less cake I’ll be able to eat in my lifetime. It’s just tragic,” Rob said, and she thought he might even be tearing up a little. Holly decided to put it down to him being slightly delirious from the blood-loss and shock.

  They followed Tom’s last steps across a couple of fields to the side of the main road, where he’d parked a surveillance van. Holly thought about trying the backdoor to see if it was open and taking a look inside, but then realised she didn’t want to. It was from here that Tom had executed a group of people who’d thought he was their friend, just by pushing a few buttons.

  The police could deal with it.

  They trudged along the icy roads, trying not to slip over, both keeping their silence. It was a lengthy walk back to civilisation, and Holly somehow knew it would be a long time before they had a moment to themselves again. Also, her phone was out of battery. Rob hadn’t even brought his with him on the trip, having presumably not expected any bad weather… or massacres.

  She looked around at the winter trees in the gently fading light as the sun started to dip in the sky. They looked just as peaceful and unmoved as when she’d arrived at Horn Hill House. Yet, beneath their branches, the world had changed. Seven had lost their lives, and there would be no future mysteries solved by those six great minds. She’d like to think that there would be no great crimes committed either, but something told her that there would always be someone ready to take Miranda’s place.

  It was good of Rob to wait until they entered the foyer of the hospital to pass out. Carrying him would have been impossible. It was not as considerate that he stayed unconscious for an hour afterwards, leaving Holly to explain everything to the police.

  By the time Rob came round and demanded food, the police had arrived at Horn Hill House and confirmed all that Holly had told them. The only thing she didn’t like was the way the two police officers in the hospital room with her and Rob kept reaching down and touching their handcuffs.

  Holly chewed her lip, remembering for the first time that she had technically killed someone. The weapon hadn’t been hers, but she’d still ended a life. Would she get in trouble for it?

  The strange thing was, the more Holly thought about it, the more she realised she didn’t feel any remorse. Instead, there was an emptiness inside. The voice inside her head reminded her that Miranda had absolutely deserved it. If she’d done nothing, both she and Rob would be dead. Thinking practically about the matter was the only way to go. Not to mention, she’d probably done the police a big favour by eliminating one of the most successful criminals around. One they hadn’t even known existed.

  It wasn’t long before the investigation uncovered the traps and found the van to be entirely clean of Rob and Holly’s fingerprints or DNA. They were in the clear and hailed as heroes. The press arrived and took pictures and statements, and the rest of the night passed in a whirl. Holly didn’t even have a moment to think about any repercussions she may be in danger of incurring - havin
g very publicly ended Miranda’s vast crime enterprise.

  Saying goodbye was harder than expected.

  Rob’s hand was still wrapped in bandages when he hugged her goodbye. Holly had been going for a handshake, but Rob had surprised her. She’d returned the hug and had discovered that you didn’t go through a deadly experience like the serial killings at Horn Hill House without forming a bond. This wasn’t like the initial attraction that had existed between them when they’d first met, what now felt like an age ago. This was something deeper. Holly supposed it was the first spark of a real friendship.

  “You shouldn’t let an experience like this one put you off. I know it was a tough case, but we got the bad guys and got out alive. That’s what matters,” Rob had offered, just before they’d parted ways. Holly had smiled and nodded. On the inside, she’d been wondering what would have happened to her if she’d been the unlucky one and had lost a finger. That would have been the end of her piano career - and how else was she going to earn her crust? She’d put that to Rob and he’d immediately suggested that she become a professional private detective and forget all about musical tomfoolery.

  He’d also pointed out that there was rather a shortage of them at the moment.

  Holly smiled as she drove back towards Sussex, marvelling at the way the weather was cold, but much less bitter, the further down the country you went. There was no sign of any snowfall.

  She idly wondered what her area of speciality would be if she did take the pathway of being a detective. Looking back at her previous cases, she’d either be looking at lost and found, or solving mass murders. Neither seemed very appealing.

  Rob had offered to help her, should she decide that she wanted to go into business. He’d even hinted at partnering up for a few cases. He’d said that her observational skills and quick thinking had impressed him. She suspected that it was just his way of saying thanks for saving his life using a rather dangerous piece of popular literature.